Van Alen Institute

New York, NY, United States

The new home of Van Alen Institute has to be many things at once. It requires curatorial flexibility for a breadth of public programming including exhibitions, lectures, reading groups, and book launches; a comfortable and efficient office environment for different scales and modes of work ranging from formal to casual; a framework that can grow to include the second floor and basement as the institution expands in the future; and a mobile street seat that brings Van Alen Institute’s mission into the urban realm. To accommodate this range of possibilities within a limited square footage, we proposed a Screen Play; a mechanism to order these spatial, curatorial, and temporal scenarios through a subtle interplay of surfaces that creates a complex and ambiguous presence in the city.